Analysis of a Song Part 2: Burn from Hamilton
Welcome or welcome back to Analysis of a Song, a series where I pick a song and break down the lyrics section by section. Last time, we analysed So Long, London by Taylor Swift. This time, I decided to break down my favourite song from my favourite musical. I’ve been a Hamilton fan since 2019 (and I saw it live in 2022). Burn is one of the few solo songs of the musical; it’s an emotional ballad sung by my favourite character, Eliza (originally played by the talented Phillipa Soo). A quick warning: this analysis will contain spoilers for Hamilton.
I saved every letter you wrote me
From the moment I read them
I knew you were mine
You said you were mine
I thought you were mine
Do you know what Angelica said?
When we saw your first letter arrive?
She said-
“Be careful with that one, love
He will do what it takes to survive”
It’s important to know the context that leads up to this song. At the beginning of Act 2, the audience watches as Alexander has an affair with Maria Reynolds while Eliza, their son Phillip, and Eliza’s sister Angelica are away. After Jefferson, Madison, and Burr accuse Alexander of embezzlement, in order to clear his name, he published a document called “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” detailing his affair for public consumption. This is a real document that Alexander Hamilton published in 1797.
The Reynolds Pamphlet is one of the most chaotic songs of the musical, which makes the transition into Burn even more jarring. From the moment the audience discovers Alexander’s cheating in Say No to This, all they want is to see Eliza’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity. They’ve been anticipating this moment. So the fact that when we finally get to see Eliza’s response she’s the only actor on stage (the only song of the musical where this is the case), just makes it all the more impactful.
She begins with discussing the letters Alexander wrote to her when they first met. The letters they wrote back and forth to each other are referenced in the song Helpless, “one week later, I’m writing a letter nightly. Now my life gets better every letter that you write me.” It’s apparent in Helpless how enamoured Eliza was with Alexander, but now as she’s going back and re-reading these letters knowing what she knows now, she’s questioning everything. The progression of “I knew you were mine” to “you said you were mine” to “I thought you were mine” perfectly demonstrates how Eliza is no longer sure of what she thought she knew to be true and is now reassessing her entire marriage.
Eliza then reflects on something Angelica said when Alexander first started sending letters. Angelica warns Eliza to be careful, as Alexander is the type of person who will “do what it takes to survive.” It is well estabolished throughout the story that Alexander is an ambitious, determined, and assertive person; but in addition to these positive traits, he’s also incredibly reckless and impulsive. As he says to Angelica in Satisfied, “You’re like me, I’m never satisfied. I have never been satisfied,” referring to how nothing in life will ever be good enough for him; he will always want more. Alexander is obsessed with his legacy, to the point where he will do anything to protect it — including destroying his own marriage and political career.
Angelica knew this about Alexander because she too is of a similar disposition. It’s clear from the way Eliza speaks of Angelica in this song that she deeply values and respects Angelica’s opinion.
You and your words flooded my senses
Your sentences left me defenceless
You built me palaces out of paragraphs
You built cathedrals
I’m re-reading the letters you wrote me
I’m searching and scanning for answers in every line
For some kind of sign
And when you were mine-
The world seemed to burn
Burn
Another key characteristic of Alexander’s character is that he has a way with words. He’s articulate, persuasive, and quick-witted. He uses his words to get things he wants; as he says in Hurricane: “I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell.” The way Eliza speaks of the effect these letters had on her is almost like she was being entranced. With every word, every sentence, every paragraph she read, the further in love with Alexander she fell.
She says, “your sentences left me defenceless,” because she let her guard down. She was completely blinded by love; Alexander’s sappy, flowery language clouded her judgement. This is evident enough in the song in which Eliza recites her love story with Alexander being called Helpless; “Boy, you got me helpless. Look into your eyes and the sky’s the limit, I’m helpless.” She compares Alexander’s letters to him building palaces and cathedrals for her, because he made her feel special. He made her feel as if Eliza was the only woman he had eyes for; which is reinforced in the things he would say to her, like telling her, “my love for you is never in doubt,” in Helpless, and deeming her, “best of wives and best of women,” in his last conversation with her before his death.
But we as an audience know that Eliza was far from the only woman Alexander had eyes for. Not only because of his affair with Maria Reynolds, but also because of his constant flirting with Angelica (and let’s be honest, there was definietly something going on between him and John Laurens. I guess what I’m saying is Alexander Hamilton was a total slut). The fact that it was all lies is what makes the betrayal run even deeper for Eliza.
There is a lot of parallelism in this song, and we get the first instance of it here. In the first section, Eliza states, “I saved every letter you wrote me,” now she’s changed it to, “I’m re-reading the letters you wrote me.” She’s re-reading the letters because she’s desperate for any clue, no matter how small, that she didn’t make it all up; proof that Alexander did love her too. But she’s also desperate for answers; answers to why Alexander betrayed her, any warning sign this was coming.
“When you were mine, the world seemed to burn.” When Eliza was with Alexander, nothing else mattered. It was just her, Alexander, and the love and passion they had for each other.
You published the letters she wrote you
You told the whole world how you brought this girl into our bed
In clearing your name
You have ruined our lives
Do you know what Angelica said?
When she read what you’d done?
She said-
“You have married an Icarus
He has flown too close to the sun”
Essentially everyone who’s seen this musical agrees that what Alexander did to Eliza was horrible, but less so from the fact that he cheated on his wife on multiple occasions and hid it from her for years, but more so that he wrote an in-depth piece about it and published it publicly for all the world to read. I cannot imagine how humiliating an experience that must be; not only to have everyone you know be aware that your husband cheated on you, but for them to know all the details because he told them.
He even attatched the private letters Maria Reynolds wrote him when he published it (it’s not just a line in the song, he actually did that). Publishing the Reynolds Pamphlet is by far the most selfish thing Alexander does throughout the entire musical. It was through and through an act of self-preservation; or, as he describes it to Angelica in the cut song Congratulations, “it was an act of political sacrifice.”
But Eliza doesn’t just say, “in clearing your name, you have ruined my life,” she says, “in clearing your name, you have ruined our lives.” Eliza wasn’t the only one who suffered the fallout, their entire family did. In real life, Alexander and Eliza had 8 children in total; in the musical, we only get to meet their first-born, Phillip, and in the story, we see him also struggle to accept what his father did. But Alexander didn’t just ruin his family’s lives, in a way, he also ruined his own life. Publishing the Reynolds Pamphlet did serious damage to his political career; as Jefferson so eloquently puts it in his taunts, “Well, he never gonna be president now.”
We then get more parallelism, with Eliza yet again reflecting on something Angelica said. Angelica compares Alexander to the famous figure in Greek mythology, Icarus. The story goes that while Icarus and his father Daedalus were trying to escape prison wearing wings made out of wax, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun because it would melt his wings. Icarus disobeyed his father and flew up high anyway. As Daedalus predicted, Icarus’s wings melted, thus causing him to fall and drown. The story is where the saying “don’t fly too close to the sun” comes from. It’s a story that warns against getting too greedy, ambitious, or prideful.
As I mentioned earlier, ambition is a key aspect of Alexander’s character. No matter how much he achieves, he continually wants more. Eliza and the life he had built wasn’t enough, he needed more. Maria was more. But he got too greedy and flew too close to the sun, and now he is facing the reprecussions of his actions. I absolutely love the way Phillipa delivers this line; she says it with so much shame in her voice, like she can’t bear that Angelica is expressing disappointment in her.
You and your words, obsessed with your legacy
Your sentences bordered on senseless
And you are paranoid in every paragraph
How they’d perceive you
You, you, you
I’m erasing myself from the narrative
Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart
You have torn it all apart
I’m watching it burn
Watching it burn
Yet again, we get more parallelism. It’s the same structure as the third stanza, when Eliza reflects on the impact Alexander’s words had on her: “You and your words flooded my senses. Your sentences left me defenceless.” Now, the same structure is being used to show Eliza’s feelings upon re-reading the letters: “You and your words, obsessed with your legacy. Your sentences bordered on senseless.”
Now that she’s no longer blinded by love, Eliza is able to re-read the old letters without the veil of ignorance and can see plain as day the bad qualities of Alexander she previously ignored. She sees now how self-obsessed and reckless he is. She sees now how rambling, overly wordy, and lacking in common sense his writing can be. This was a criticism Alexander was not unaquainted with; in Cabinet Battle #1, Jefferson mocks Alexander’s excessive wordiness; “this financial plan is an outrageous demand and it’s too many damn pages for any man to understand.” Additionally, Burr always warned Alexander agaisnt this habit, repeatedly telling him to, “talk less, smile more.” Alexander himself even acknowledges this habit in Non-Stop: “I know I talk too much, I’m abrasive.” But I can imagine this insult he’s familiar with would hurt even more coming from his usually patient and kind-tempered wife.
Eliza also sees now how paranoid Alexander is over his reputation and the way others perceive him. He constantly feels the need to defend himself to anyone he feels misperceives him. When John Adams publicly insulted him, Alexander came back even stronger, releasing a letter disgracing him. When Alexander was accused of embezzlement and thereby abusing his power as treasury secretary, he came back with the Reynolds Pamplet. In Congratulations, Angelica calls him out on this, saying: “So scared of what your enemies will do to you, you’re the only enemy you ever seem to lose to. You know why Jefferson can do what he wants? He doesn’t dignify schoolyard taunts with a response.” Eliza even lectures him on this in another cut song, Let it Go: “You don’t have to bring a gun to a knife fight.”
A core aspect of the musical is Alexander’s obsession with legacy. Everything he does, he does with the intention of preserving his legacy (I talk about this more in-detail in a past essay). This is a major difference in how Alexander and Eliza think. In Act 1, on a song called That Would Be Enough, Eliza says to Alexander, “we don’t need a legacy. We don’t need money,” in an attempt to highlight to him that his priorities should be the here and now — his wife and his family — not chasing material wealth and being remembered in history.
I’m sorry, but the literature girlie in me couldn’t help but geek out over the use of alliteration and assonance in this part:
You and your words, obsessed with your legacy
Your sentences bordered on senseless
And you are paranoid in every paragraph how they’d perceive you
Eliza then finishes this stanza by repeating the word: “you, you, you.” This can be interpreted in multiple different ways. I think in part it is Eliza again mocking how self-absorbed and selfish Alexander is, but she delivers the line with so much pain that it makes me think she’s also in part referring to how much Alexander has taken up her own mind. In a way, she too is just as infactuated with Alexander as he is with himself. It’s also worth noting the use of second person throughout this entire song; the fact that Eliza is adressing Alexander directly instead of referring to him in third person makes it more personal, intimate, and all the more scathing.
At this point in the song, Eliza takes the letters she’s holding and begins to burn them with a lantern. This is based on something that actually happened. While she didn’t burn all of the letters as she does in the play, Eliza really did destroy the majority of her letter exchanges between Alexander and herself, and her reasoning for doing this is unknown by historians. In Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin Manuel Miranda says: “This gave me enormous freedom, but also gave me a dramatic action. What if Eliza’s reaction is to erase her reaction from memory?” (p. 238).
Eliza says, “I’m erasing myself from the narrative.” It’s a call-back to something Eliza says to Alexander in That Would Be Enough; “Let me be a part of the narrative, in the story they will write someday. Let this moment be the first chapter where you decide to stay.” Eliza no longer wants to be part of this narrative, but this time, she’s not asking for Alexander’s permission. She’s erasing herself from Alexander’s narrative without letting him have a say, and in doing so, she’s taking back control of her own narrative. However, by the final song of the musical, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, Eliza reverses this, saying: “I put myself back in the narrative,” once she’s forgiven Alexander and devotes the rest of her life to preserving his legacy.
There is most definitely a mocking undertone to, “let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart.” Eliza knows there is nothing more important to Alexander than his legacy and being remembered in history instead of fading into oblivion, and by burning the letters he wrote to her, she is damaging his legacy and erasing a part of his story. She knows that is the best way she can hurt him. As Jeremy McCarter says in Hamilton: The Revolution; “What retribution could be crueller and more fitting? She burned the letters he had written to her — she destroyed his words” (p. 228).
The world has no right to my heart
The world has no place in our bed
They don’t get to know what I said
I’m burning the memories
Burning the letters that might have redeemed you
You forfeit all rights to my heart
You forfeit the place in our bed
You’ll sleep in your office instead
With only the memories of when you were mine
I hope that you burn…
As the song progresses, Eliza gradually gets angrier and angrier, which is shocking for the audience to see, because up until this point, all that we’ve seen of Eliza is a character that is patient, empathetic, and a calming presence among the other chaotic characters. That’s what makes it so impactful when we finally get to see Eliza lash out in this way. She scorns Alexander for invading her privacy and letting the world in on something that wasn’t theirs, and because of this, he doesn’t have the right to those things either anymore.
She doesn’t just say that he’s losing the right to her heart, she specifies that he’s forfeiting; he’s only losing her heart because of his own wrongdoings. She knows in the future historians may use her and Alexander’s back and forth letters to redeem him and paint him in a better light because of how affectionately they spoke to one another. But Eliza knows Alexander doesn’t deserve redemption, so she’s destroying the evidence.
The use of the word “mine” is a motif in Eliza’s relationship with Alexander. In Helpless, she says: “Grab my sister and whisper, ‘yo, this one’s mine.’” In fact, the very first demo of Helpless was called, “This One’s Mine.” She also references it multiple times in this song: “I knew you were mine, you said you were mine, I thought you were mine,” and, “when you were mine, the world seemed to burn.” But now, she’s letting go. Now Alexander will only be left with the memories of when he belonged to Eliza.
After the build up comes to an end, we come back down and all becomes quiet and still as Eliza delivers the final and most scathing line of the entire song- “I hope that you burn.”
As I said earlier, Hamilton is easily my favourite musical, and Burn my favourite song from it. This song has always been my favourite because through both the lyrics and the vocal performance, I can feel Eliza’s emotions so clearly. It’s such a well-written ballad and one of the most pivotal and unforgettable moments in the show.
If you have any other different interpretations to this song, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. I’ll see you in the next analysis.
- Lilly :)
this was great! unpopular opinion but before I saw Hamilton on stage, Burn was a total skip on the soundtrack for me. and then when I saw it on stage, it was maybe the best part of the musical, you're right it's so impactful and emotional. (I haven't listened to the soundtrack since though but would be less likely to skip after seeing it!)